I met Dryden Helgoe six years ago when she was part of team behind a new landscape at Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena. Shortly afterward, I worked with her on a playground plan for a school garden. During both encounters, she was inscrutable: gracious, spookily competent and distractingly beautiful as a Botticelli angel. Then, by the end of 2005, she was gone — off to start a family.

During the intervening years, I wondered more than once if the choice of stay-at-home motherhood would retire Helgoe. When I met her, she was a rising star. The University of Oregon landscape architecture graduate had a year at the Olin Studio in Philadelphia and five with Nancy Goslee Power & Associates in Santa Monica. Helgoe’s disappearance from the scene left a void.

Click here to keep reading about Dryden Helgoe’s return to landscaping in The Dry Garden column of the Los Angeles Times.